09 May 2013

Combining Elements and Principles of Design

There are other tools that can do some if not all of the same things Wideo can do, but I keep going back to Wideo for these reasons:

It's simple. I have Anime Studio and I've used AfterEffects and Motion, which can all do pretty amazing things, but usually I just want simple keyframe animation without all the fancy advanced stuff.

It's not too simple. There's still a lot of cool stuff you can do with Wideo if you're clever. I haven't even begun to use my own PNG's.

It's easier than PowerPoint or Keynote. I was showing this tool to a student, and she responded, "Can't you just do that in PowerPoint?" It's true, I could have created the same things in PowerPoint, it's a pretty big pain to get this kind of timing control.

It's online. I can work on it on whatever computer I happen to be using. This is good for me because I have two computers at school and two at home, three Mac, one PC. Not only that, but when I do decide to roll out a keyframe animation project to students, they can do the same.

Embedding. This is especially useful for putting video on Edmodo (Facebook for education).

Of course, I still have a few issues with the software:

No precise editing or snapping. I mentioned this before, and I'll mention it again. I want to have a more precise timeline, and I want videos to snap either to my playhead or to the endpoints of another clip.

Works better on PC. Copying and pasting, for example, doesn't work on a Mac at all.